War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock

way to seeing the mineral cycles, the water cycles, air cycles, nutrient cycles as sacramental ... the expression of it is simple: feeling gratitude to it all; taking responsibility for your own acts; keeping contact with the sources of energy that flow into your own life (namely dirt, water, flesh) (Snyder, 1995: 188).

      The way to achieve this may be to cultivate a ‘sense of place’, a sense exemplified by Thoreau’s attachment to Walden pond. Many spiritual teachers speak of the importance of ‘place’ to maintain one’s spiritual connections to the earth. The contemporary American environmental writer Barry Lopez advises us to ‘reintegrate ourselves in specific geographic places’ emotionally and intellectually. He believes that

      by cutting ourselves off from Nature, by turning Nature into scenery and commodities, we may cut ourselves off from something vital. To repair this damage we can’t any longer take what we call ‘Nature’ for an object. We must merge it again with our own nature (Lopez, 1998: 6).

      For others, this place should involve contact with wild nature if we are to be whole people. A South African doctor maintains that wilderness is ‘the finest antidepressant’ he knows. Nabham laments that

      wild landscapes survive only as enclaves in a matrix of human domination. It may be that we need something else as much as we need these postage-stamp enclaves of so called pristine nature ... We need something more than rigorously protected forests and parklands to keep us whole (Nabham, 1993: 207).

      To be whole, we need contact with ‘rough country’ and ‘wild creatures whose otherness is inviolate’, because ‘there is something wild within each of us which needs this’ (Nabham, 1993: 210).

      This would imply that respecting the value of nature is part of human self-realisation. The English philosopher Kate Soper points out that Arne Naess, the founder of ‘deep ecology’, defends his perspective in these terms, i.e. in terms of human self-realisation (Soper, 1995). Naess justifies his call for the development of deep identification of individuals with all life forms precisely in terms of its significance for the individual.

      But others reject this instrumental view of nature. For example, Fowles writes:

      The subtlest of our alienations from it (nature), the most difficult to comprehend, is our need to use it in some way, to derive some personal yield. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves) and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability — however innocent and harmless the use (Fowles, 2001: 133).

      NATURE AS A STORE OF BIODIVERSITY

      For others, ‘nature’ is a store of biodiversity. Biodiversity, like ‘nature’, is a contested concept, broadly referring to a complex of interactions — not only species, but their surroundings and relationships. According to the American biologist Edward Wilson, it means

      the totality of hereditary variation in life forms, across all levels of biological organisation, from genes and chromosomes within individual species to the array of species themselves and finally, at the highest level, the living communities of ecosystems such as forests and lakes (Wilson, 1994: 359).

      Wilson stresses that there is much we do not know, and it is disappearing through the reduction of habitat and other human activities. This threat of extinction is especially worrying to those who ground the notion of biodiversity in a conception of rights, which is sometimes called the ‘Noah Principle’, which maintain that every species has an inalienable right to exist. A different view is that other species have no rights or fewer rights than humans, and no or little value apart from their ability to fulfill human needs.

      In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1962) presented the most powerful ecological argument for preserving biodiversity in her notion of a web of life that binds together all organisms. The implication of this interconnectedness is that even small change in one area or species will reverberate throughout the ecosystem. It is a web of life or death.

      Even looking from a superficial or surface level, from what is sometimes termed ‘a shallow ecology’, a case can be made for preserving biodiversity. The argument is that the world’s diversity of plant and animal species should be protected so that it may be tapped for human benefit, because the extinction of species will deprive future generations of new medicines and new strains of food crops. Such shallow ecology views nature as a collection of natural resources.

      NATURE AS A SOURCE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

      In this mainstream perspective favoured by planners and economists nature is reduced to a store of ‘raw materials’ to be exploited to satisfy human needs. This is the discourse of sustainable development, where the stress is on promoting the thrifty use of resources without diminishing their quality or endangering their supply. As Sachs writes: ‘A resource is something that has no value until it has been made into something else’ (Sachs, 1999: 50). Landscapes are seen as real estate for ‘development’, forests as timber for logging and so on. Nature is regarded as perhaps an object of beauty, but it is separate from human beings and has no intrinsic value. Similarly, the discourse of ‘ecological modernisation’ emphasises an instrumental view and a reliance on technology to solve environmental problems.

      This orientation to nature means that nature is a depository of resources to be exploited instrumentally through what Luke calls ‘eco-managerialism’ (cited in Fisher and Hajer, 1999). This position is all about the management, prediction and control of nature. Some naturalists, such as F. W. Fitzsimons, author of The Natural History of South Africa (1932), presented our relationship with nature as a war. He wrote: ‘There is much spade work and great battles yet to be fought by the human race against the adverse forces of Nature which retard the spread of the human race over earth’s fair surface’ (cited in Carruthers, 2005: 17). Some of the worst environmental abuses — such as the destruction of the Florida everglades — have been done in the name of dominating and controlling nature. It is in projects like this that many environmental studies graduates end up, and it perpetuates our alienation from nature. Environmental management realises in practice the ideological commitments of the Enlightenment — that nature is simply use-value, subject to rational control, matter without spirit and representing ‘control over nature raised to the level of human mastery’ (Schoolman, 1994: xv).

      As Luke writes:

      While students may enter schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources in search of wisdom from Aldo Leopold or John Muir, they mostly leave as eco-managerialists, or adept practioners of ecosystem management/analysis, ecological risk analysis, and recreation resource administration (Luke, 1999: 118).

      Nature is stripped of spiritual qualities and is reduced to a cluster of exploitable natural resources. Richard Nelson was one such student. He has written of his love of animals as a boy and how he ‘tried expressing this love through studies of zoology’, but found that ‘this only seemed to put another kind of barrier between humanity and nature — the detachment of science and abstraction’ (Nelson, 2001: 107). But consumerism constructs an even stronger barrier than this kind of instrumental rationality in its use of nature as a commodity or marketing tool.

      NATURE AS A COMMODITY OR MARKETING TOOL

      Increasingly in urban–industrial society, people relate to nature as consumers, a relation that indicates the extent of our alienation and estrangement from it. In the United States, The Nature Company’s stated mission is to ‘connect us to nature’. It markets products that sustain American middle-class ideas of nature at the same time as it promotes the consumption of natural resources that underpins the American middle-class life. Consuming one of the company’s 12 000 products, such as a plastic whale or an inflatable penguin, does not only signal alienation; it also means ‘consuming natural resources like oil, wood, minerals and energy’ (Price, 1995: 199).

      A process of marketing a romanticised wild nature is not only evident in the commodities such as wildlife calendars and T-shirts sold by corporations like The Nature Company, but in the increasing use of imagery from nature in advertising to enhance corporate profits. An appeal to nature is used to promote the consumption of many different foodstuffs, which are marketed as ‘nature’s foods’, and consumer goods such as baby care products,